Google - a step too far?

Hasn’t Google been in the news a lot recently? Not content with being recognised as the internet’s best search engine and becoming the world’s largest media company, Google is expanding into new areas and exercising its new found influence. But with this expansion and power Google is experiencing significant growing pains and possibly damaging its brand.

Firstly, against a backdrop of much excitement, Google launched Google Base – which they describe as - a place where you can post all types of content and have it show up on Google -Commentators in the US thought that Google Base marked the company’s entry into traditional classifieds and that the much talked about demise of newspaper classifieds and even online classifieds was about to occur in the face of this killer blow from the world’s largest media company. Google observers even set up blogs dedicated watching Google Base and posted screenshots of early test screens!

Despite much excitement, Google base is yet to have a significant impact on the classified market (though it is still very early days), although some job boards are posting client vacancies to the system and some candidate management systems have integrated Google Base into their job board posting tools. Given the mass market nature of Google I think it’s unlikely that all job seekers will be comfortable searching for an opportunity within Google Base and that senior and specialist candidates will prefer to use environments that are more tailored to and familiar with the areas within which they operate.

Next came Google’s entry into China with www.google.cn and the company’s decision to work with the Chinese government to censor the results of searches for items that the government wished to prevent it’s citizens accessing – for example regarding Tiananmen Square (you can use Google China to search for Tiananmen Square from outside China, but if searching from within China your IP address is identified and your results blocked). This decision seemed very surprising; especially in light of Google’s Do no evil company motto.

Surely Google’s brand values have been badly damaged by this decision? There shouldn’t be any middle ground when it comes to the freedom of information online, either users can access results to their searches, or they can’t and to prevent some users accessing certain information in order to facilitate entry into a potentially lucrative local market just seems ‘wrong’ and is certainly at odds with Google’s values.

Third was Google’s decision to remove www.bmw.de from it’s directory of sites (it has since been restored) due to the organisation’s use of techniques that misled Google’s indexing system and directed traffic to the site even if searches conducted were not relevant – explicitly not allowed under Google’s terms and conditions – though the extent to which such techniques are used more widely by web optimisers is a grey area.

Add all of these incidents to Google’s decision to scrap the agency commission model for advertising agencies using its services in the UK and the result is an organisation that built its reputation on simplicity and purity damaging its brand by going too far. You can’t deny that some of Google’s new tools – Google Earth for example – are fantastic, but surely the beauty of Google was that it presented you with a simple text box, you typed in your search and got back relevant results?

To elaborate on and to compromise this model may seem attractive but could endanger the very values on which the company was built.